Karl Marx. Capital Volume One Ch1 Sec1

The Two Factors of a Commodity: Use-Value and Value

If Marx wants you to know one thing about capitalism, it is that it is all about commodities. The opening of the book establishes what Marx considers a COMMODITY to be.

Basic tenets of COMMODITIES:

1. It has to be human made and not taken from nature.
2. It has to be produced to be exchanged and not to be given directly to consume.

When considering COMMODITIES Marx points to two important values:

1. USE VALUE - A value to acknowledge the quantity of the commodity. It is some value linked to a physical trait either the amount of units, weight, the units of length.
2. EXCHANGE VALUE - a value used to arbitrate the ratio between the USE VALUE of two different commodities. It is not linked to any physical trait. It is just a ratio of USE VALUES.

LABOR is calculated very much like USE VALUE in that it is a number based on a trait. This is the duration of LABOR needed to produce an amount of the commodity. Marx states that when calculating LABOR in a capitalist system, it is only important to consider LABOR of the entire system. This means the total amount of LABOR used to make all the commodities exchanged.

Marx puts much emphasis on LABOR being the driving force for USE VALUE and EXCHANGE VALUE. The reason being that the more of a commodity you can make the hire the USE VALUE (remember the USE VALUE is just measurement of how much of a commodity you have). When the USE VALUE changes it effects the EXCHANGE VALUE because when you make more of something it generally decreases in value making the ratio of its value to other commodities different.

LABOR is also fluctuates in productivity for various reasons that either boost or deflate. This in turn fluctuates the EXCHANGE VALUE as commodities' USE VALUE will be going up and down.

Wall Street Protests

New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, chastised protesters on wall street claiming they are chasing away jobs from those who are employed there.

"If the jobs they are trying to get rid of in this city – the people that work in finance, which is a big part of our economy – go away, we're not going to have any money to pay our municipal employees or clean our parks or anything else."
Michael Bloomberg: Occupy Wall Street is trying to destroy jobs

But I think there is a big problem Bloomberg is missing. The protests are for that very reason. I guess the problem is why should an industry be solely responsible for municipal employees or clean parks and 'everything else'? Why aren't municipalities robust enough to finance themselves?

More and more people are losing their jobs or working long hours for low wages. A large part of wages, if one is lucky to have a job, goes to paying debt and not to support their community. And more and more people are starting to question how they have become so useless to take care of necessities.

Bloomberg's comments highlight a major problem: a person in charge of managing a municipality isn't concerned about the health of the municipality depending so much on finance rather than its citizens.

He isn't emphasizing strengthening municipalities by protecting it from industries attempting to dominate it. He's just announcing that New York is pinned.

Essentially Bloomberg's telling the protesters:

I get what you're saying but so what?

He's advocating letting the machinery of government rust even more and rely on an industry the protesters see as harmful to upkeep public infrastructure.

Why should people even feel secure public parks and employees will still be around the way things are going if wall street isn't reformed?

When a wolf comes huffing and puffing, it's good not to build your house out of straw or sticks. If you build it out of bricks then it's no problem. Unfortunately the way we've been treating municipalities and government is to build them as cheaply as possible while hiring the big bad wolf to personally over see their construction. And politicians are just broadcasters of this message instead of getting out the bricks and mortar.

Of course politicians do not get elected by giving speeches of what they personally think. Much of their actions and words simply mimic what argument the public finds most attractive. It will take consistent pressure by the public and a nack to side step attempts to obscure the message to see civility take hold of system of brutes.

In order to be effect the wall street protesters have to be persuasive that this is persistent and it is an itch that will be scratched until it goes away.

Artificial Intellegence

Watson, the computer designed to play Jeopardy!, has people talking about whether computers will ever be able to think like humans do. The actuality of that happening is unlikely.

One thing about human thinking is that it's fused with function. While recalling trivia for a game show, our brains monitor our heart beat and makes sure we are breathing. Thinking isn't much different. Although they may not seem so, thoughts are geared to monitor our environment and make sure we take care of the necessities of life. When we are are hungry we think a lot about food, when we are on a trivia game show, we think a lot about trivia.

Watson was designed to answer questions for the sake of answering questions. Humans learn answers not for the sake answering questions. There is a benefit to having knowledge. It shapes how we make decisions. Presumably you can make better decisions while knowing many alternatives and the likely outcomes. But we set aside trivial pursuits when the situation calls for it. Watson doesn't monitor power plants and recognize there will be a power shortage. If asked a question he would not answer, "The power will go out in the next 5 minutes, I see no point in answering this question. I'm just going to take the rest of the time I have to enjoy myself."

Watson was designed to be a tool. It's a computer to achieve what humans cannot achieve with their own abilities. It's designed to replicate the fruits of human thought without an understanding of what thoughts are. A computer can be designed to play Jeopardy! but can it be designed to be human? I think not.

There could not be a bigger travesty of a statement other than, "I think there fore I am." It's rhetorically splashy but bound with error. Thinking allows us to think about being but doesn't cause it. Thinking is not always advantageous or necessary. It is something humans do but it might not be what a living thing made of silicon wafers needs to survive. It is dear to humans, but why do we act like everything is jealous that cannot think?

Brevity

Describing things can be hazardous. A long-winded description will be close to the actual thing. At some point it becomes better just to witness the thing in itself rather than put it into language.

A description that is too brief will be unsatisfactory since the description is too weak to imagine without the actual thing in front of you. The reason why it should be put into language is incomplete.

The saying by William Shakespeare, "brevity is the soul of wit" seems to contain this train of thought. An intelligent description is a balance between not knowing what to say thus saying everything and not saying enough thus exchanging no idea at all.

Memory

What is memory? When you take account of how small your head is and how much information it can contain, the validity of this information is suspect. A newly recalled memory is often like recalling a dream.

After all, what would our dreams be without memory? This land that is our own private land that we charge up with symbols and feelings during the day. But this does not say what memory is.

So again, what is memory? Do we really save memories in these long detailed accounts? Do we have scribes in our brains?

I think the answer can be discovered easy enough. The act of remembering should reveal what happens if you examine it close enough. Most often memory starts with a pang. This is a flash of something. It is a beginning, or more accurately, a point.

This point is brought out of memory. We think about that point in the present using our minds to logically create a story. To draw the memory out. We don't store anything but this point in our head. We don't need to. All we need is the beginning and we fill it in afterwards.

Our memories depend on our thinking like math equations are. The answer to the equation does not need to be stored. To save space, all we need are some clues and then since we contain the ability to do math, we solve the puzzle with some time. Variables are not constant. We can adjust when something becomes different.

Or memories are often shifting. Things from childhood must be recalculated. Memories would be no good to us if we could not shape them in the present. They would be like wearing clothes we wore in childhood. They'd be too small and out of style and capable of tearing apart so they can't be worn.

Devided Government

Americans are often depicted as being suspicious of government. One way Americans medicate this itch is to slow down the government by creating competition between the two dominant parties.

Republicans and Democrats behave as in a sporting event. Each legislation passed is like a point. Regardless of what the legislation is or what it was proposed to do, the two parties aim to score the maximum amount of points themselves while keeping their opponent at a minimum.

When Americans want to render the powers of government impotent, they vote the parties in power so each has about equal representation. The government is rushed into inaction by the parties vehemently competing with each other.

But fierce competition is not the only way to cause inaction. It is probably the least desirable cause of inaction because it creates low quality agendas and legislation.

But what are the alternatives? How can we slow down an eager government without wasting so much energy creating needless opposition? How do we avoid parties opposing legislation that itself was proposed by the other party to be oppositional?

I will propose one method. It is a time honored tradition used by the countless intellectual beings through out human history. Thought. Thinking is the thief of action. If we want government to slow down, why not structure the government so that the intensity of thought needed to pass legislation is raised. The result of this would create laws that were enacted slowly yet well thought out. It seems to me an infinitely more advantageous way than laws enacted when two parties scratch at each other's jugular, only to pass laws when one party loses focus while finding a new ways to maim their opponent.

Why don't we as a collective society choose laws of intellect rather than laws of base, competitive tomfoolery?